The intruder braced himself, gripping Mukobo with one hand — and pushing a button on the folding frame with his other.
A sharp crack as an explosive bolt fired, breaking the frame apart — and all three men were hauled skywards as the Bombardier climbed. The slipstream immediately snatched them backwards, swinging them terrifyingly over the larger jet’s fuselage, but the line was already being winched in. The 747 dropped away beneath them — with no one at the controls.
The dangling trio ascended towards the business jet. Mukobo cried out in fear, but his companions remained stoic and calm. Hands reached out from the hatch to grab them, a man pulling the first rescuer inside and detaching him from the cable before hauling Mukobo and the second intruder through the opening.
The warlord collapsed breathlessly on the deck as the arm was retracted and the hatch closed. The wind’s roar abruptly cut out, the sudden silence almost disorienting. The men who had extracted him from the 747 carried him to a seat at the cabin’s rear.
Panting, Mukobo focused on the man facing him — then jumped in alarm as recognition struck. ‘You!’
He tensed as if to lunge at him, but his rescuers shoved him back down. The other man didn’t even flinch. ‘Mr Mukobo,’ he said as the plane banked, turning back eastward. ‘I have a proposition…’
The 747 thundered on, its descent gradually steepening. Desperate hammering sounded over the wind as the cabin crew beat uselessly on the cockpit door. A pause, then gunshots, bullets from the dead marshals’ weapons smacking into the lock — but the armoured barrier remained secure.
The altimeter dropped below two thousand feet. The combination of altitude and descent angle triggered a warning, a whooping alarm sounding as a synthesised female voice spoke with inhuman calm. ‘Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.’
Nobody could respond to it. Fifteen hundred feet. ‘Pull up. Pull up.’ The Boeing dropped towards the sea—
Watley stirred.
The cacophony finally overcame the remnants of the drug in his bloodstream. One thousand feet. The American groaned. ‘What… Pierre, what the—’
He froze as he saw his co-pilot dead in his seat, half his skull missing. The computer’s repetitive words finally sank in. Five hundred feet. Terror-induced adrenalin obliterated any lingering sedative and he grabbed the controls, pulling back the yoke and slamming the throttles to full power. Three hundred feet, two hundred, and the 747 responded, but too slowly—
One hundred feet, fifty, the airliner’s bow hitting the water — and augering into it.
With the engines at maximum thrust, the results were catastrophic.
The 747’s tail flipped upwards, the nose crumpling as it drove deeper into the sea. Watley had just enough time to scream before a broken structural spar sliced him in half. An engine tore loose from its mount as the plane rolled and punched through the hull, compressor blades disintegrating into razor shards that shredded everyone in their path. Fuel from a ruptured wing tank burst into a liquid inferno and sent a wave of flame crashing over the wreckage. Blazing chunks of mangled metal skipped across the water before finally being swallowed by the Atlantic.
Silence soon fell, drifting smoke and floating debris all that remained of Skyblue Airlines Flight 180.
2
A hot and gritty wind blew across the Temple Mount, making Dr Nina Wilde narrow her eyes behind her sunglasses. Despite the discomfort, however, the archaeologist was still in awe of her surroundings. The hilltop was one of the holiest sites of three religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — with a history dating back over five thousand years, and the splendid buildings dominating the walled enclosure, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, were two of the world’s oldest Islamic structures.
It wasn’t simply the air of history that excited her, though. Something new was about to be discovered. And she was not just involved with it; she was largely responsible for it.
Six years earlier, Nina had been kidnapped by a religious fanatic intent on uncovering a deadly secret encoded in the Book of Revelation. The trail led her to a cave in the desert of southern Israel, where she found a statue: one of the angels that would supposedly herald the apocalypse. It was the container in which it was hidden that had been the most amazing discovery, however.
The Ark of the Covenant.
The golden chest had waited undisturbed for millennia until she, her husband Eddie Chase and young Mossad agent Jared Zane found it. The Ark contained the items promised by biblical legend, including the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments — a world-shaking find.
That had only been the beginning, though. Once Israeli archaeologists secured the site, they unearthed more relics — including some leading back to the Temple Mount. Records from the era of the great King Solomon revealed the precise location of a place long thought lost: the First Temple, dedicated to Yahweh, god of the Israelites, by Solomon himself. The temple had been destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, its remains buried and forgotten as later places of worship were built over it… but now, thanks to her, the archaeologists knew exactly where to look.
And they had found it.
She gazed down the slope. Amongst the trees was a large tent covering a newly excavated entrance to the hidden ruins. Nina had been given a privilege rare for a Western archaeologist by being allowed to participate; the politics of the Temple Mount were tangled, riven by centuries of religious and national hostility, and it had taken a great deal of bargaining with the Israelis, who controlled access to the site, and the Jordanians, who controlled the site itself, for the work to be permitted at all. But her reputation as the world’s most famous archaeologist held weight, and now she was here, to witness the opening of the First Temple.
An astounding discovery… for which she would have an audience.
Nina glanced up. A small drone was flying over the hill, getting aerial footage of the Temple Mount for later editing into a documentary series. Her series. Two years earlier, she had been offered a new challenge: to recount her discovery of the lost civilisation of Atlantis for television. Those who knew her had been surprised that she accepted, given that her prior appearances in the public eye were slightly begrudging, but a movie based on her first adventure had been — to her mind — a ludicrous collection of chases, gunfights and exploding helicopters, and she wanted to set the record straight about what really happened. (Even though it had indeed involved chases, gunfights and exploding helicopters.)
The series had been successful enough for the network to request a follow-up. The obvious choice was her biblical discoveries, bringing her to the Middle East along the trail of the Ark of the Covenant. There was also the bonus that with excavations ongoing, something amazing might be discovered on camera: an irresistible hook for any executive.
That was, she mused irritably, if the other archaeologists ever got their asses in gear…
Nina finished a bottle of water and went to the tent. The drone, a quadcopter fitted with a high-definition camera, tracked her. The clip might be used to bridge together scenes of her exploration of the Temple Mount, or not at all, but the production team wanted as much material to work with as possible. With filming now entirely digital, the only limitation on how much they could shoot was hard drive space, and the crew always had many terabytes available for original footage, with multiple backups.
Her team was waiting outside the tent, some relaxing in the shade of the olive trees while others made the most of the sun. ‘Have I missed anything?’ she asked.